Anthony Powell - Soldier's Art

I had sometimes wondered how Eleanor’s ménage with Norah Tolland had begun. No one ever seemed to know. Now it was explained.

“Where’s Norah now?”

“In Scotland, driving for the Poles.”

She dried her eyes.

“Come on,” she said. “We must get out some sort of plan. No good just sitting about. I’ll find a pencil and paper.”

She began to rummage in one of the drawers.

“Here we are.”

We made lists of names, notes of things that would have to be done. One of the wardens came up to say that for the time being the house was safe to stay in, they were going home.

“Where are you spending the night, Nick?”

“A club.”

“There might be someone who could take you part of the way. The chief warden’s got a car.”

“What about you?”

“I shall be all right. There’s a room fitted up with a bed in the basement. Ted used it sometimes, if he had to come in very late.”

“Will you really be all right?”

She dismissed the question of herself rather angrily. The A.R.P. official with the car was found.

“Good-bye, Eleanor.”

I kissed her, which I had never done before,

“Good-bye, Nick. Love to Isobel. It was lucky I was staying here really, because there’ll be a lot that will have to be done.”

The fire-engines had driven away. The street was empty. I thought how good Eleanor was in a situation like this. Molly had been good, too, when it came to disaster. I wondered what would happen to Ted. The extraordinary thing about the outside of the house was that everything looked absolutely normal. Some sort of a notice about bomb damage had been stuck on the front-door by the wardens; otherwise there was nothing to indicate the place had been subjected to an attack from the air, which had killed several persons. This lack of outward display was comparable with the Madrid’s fate earlier that evening, when a lot of talking in a restaurant had been sufficient to drown the sound of the Warning, the noise of the guns. This must be what Dr. Trelawney called “the slayer of Osiris and his grievous tribute of blood.” I wondered if Dr. Trelawney himself had survived: when Odo Stevens would receive the news: whether the Lovells’ daughter, Caroline, would be brought up by her grandparents. Reflecting on these things, it did not seem all that long time ago that Lovell, driving back from the film studios in that extraordinary car of his, had suggested we should look in on the Jeavonses’, because “the chief reason I want to visit Aunt Molly is to take another look at Priscilla Tolland, who is quite often there.”

The first meal eaten in Mess after return from leave is always dispiriting. Room, smell, food, company, at first seemed unchanged; as ever, unenchanting. On taking a seat at table I remembered with suddenly renewed sense of internal discomfort that Stringham would be on duty. In the pressure of other things that had been happening, I had forgotten about him. However, when the beef appeared, it was handed round by a red-haired gangling young soldier with a hare-lip and stutter. There was no sign of Stringham. The new waiter could be permanent, or just a replacement imported to F Mess while Stringham himself was sick, firing a musketry course, temporarily absent for some other routine reason. Opportunity to enquire why he was gone, at the same time to betray no exceptional interest in him personally, arose when Soper complained of the red-haired boy’s inability to remember which side of the plate, as a matter of common practice, were laid knife, fork and spoon.

“Like animals, some of them,” Soper said. “As for getting a message delivered, you’re covered with spit before he’s half-way through.”

“What happened to the other one?”

If asked a direct question of that sort, Soper always looked suspicious. Finding, after a second or two, no grounds for imputing more than idle curiosity to this one, he returned a factual, though reluctant, reply.

“Went to the Mobile Laundrv.”

“For the second time of asking, Soper,” said Macfie, “will you pass the water jug?”

“Here you are, Doc. Those tablets come in yet?”

Macfie was gruff about the tablets, Soper persuasive. The Cipher Officer remarked on the amount of flu about. There was general agreement, followed by some discussion of prevalent symptoms. The subject of Stringham had to be started up again from scratch.

“Did you sack him?”

“Sack who?”

“The other Mess waiter.”

“What’s he got to do with you?”

“Just wondered.”

“He was transferred to the Laundry from one day to the next. Bloody inconvenient for this Mess. He’d have done the job all right if Biggy hadn’t been on at him all the time. I complained to the D.A.A.G. about losing a waiter like that, but he said it had got to go through.”

Biggs, present at table, but in one of his morose moods that day, neither denied nor confirmed his own part in the process of Stringham’s dislodgement. He chewed away at a particularly tough piece of meat, looking straight in front of him. Soper, as if Biggs himself were not sitting there, continued to muse on the aversion felt by Biggs for Stringham.

“That chap drove Biggy crackers for some reason,” he said. “Something about him. Wasn’t only the way he talked. Certainly was a dopey type. Don’t know how he got where he was. Had some education. I could see that. You’d think he’d have found better employment than a Mess waiter. Got a bad record, I expect. Trouble back in Civvy Street.”

That Stringham had himself engineered an exchange from F Mess to avoid relative persecution at the hands of Biggs was, I thought unlikely. In his relationship with Biggs, even a grim sort of satisfaction to Stringham might be suspected, one of those perverse involutions of feeling that had brought him into the army in the first instance. Such sentiments were hard to unravel. They were perhaps no more tangled than the rest of the elements that made up Stringham’s life — or anybody else’s life when closely examined. Not only had he disregarded loopholes which invited avoidance of the Services — health, and, at that period, age too — but, in face of much apparent discouragement from the recruiting authorities, had shown uncharacteristic persistence to get where he was. One aspect of this determination to carry through the project of joining the army was no doubt an attempt to rescue a self-respect badly battered during the years with Miss Weedon; however much she might also have accomplished in setting Stringham on his feet. An innate restlessness certainly played a part too; taste for change, even for adventure of a sort; all perhaps shading off into a vague romantic patriotism that especially allured by its own ironic connotations, its very lack, so to speak, of what might be called contemporary intellectual prestige.

“Awfully chic to be killed,” he had said.

Death was a prize, at least on the face of it, that war always offered. Lovell’s case had demonstrated how the unexpected could happen within a few hours to those who deplored a sedentary job. Thinking over Stringham’s more immediate situation, it seemed likely that, hearing of a vacancy in the ranks of the Mobile Laundry, he had decided on impulse to explore a new, comparatively exotic field of army life in his self-imposed military pilgrimage. Bithel could even have marked down Stringham as a man likely to do credit to the unit he commanded. That, I decided, was even more probable. These speculations had taken place during one of the Mess’s long silences, less nerve-racking than those at the general’s table, but also, in most respects, even more dreary. Biggs suddenly, unexpectedly, returned to the subject.

“Glad that bugger’s gone,” he said. “Got me down. It’s a fact he did. I’ve got worries enough as it is, without having him about the place.”